Venus On The Tear

Patrick Walshe is speaking with all the fervour of a man who fears he may have only one shot at a title fight. But then, in a sense, right now he has. He not only wrote and directs Venus With A Filthy Hangover, which is currently being staged at Dublin's Andrew's Lane Theatre, he's putting up "a lot of the money" for the production himself.

The actors, mostly female, in the production also are currently "doing it for no salary" and all are praying that its run will be extended. And that theatres such as the Abbey, Gate and Druid who are "sending their people to see it" will pick up on the option. But what he needs mostly is "for the general public to just give it a chance".
So what we want to know upfront is why any reader of hotpress should turn away from the television, a cinema screen or journey out of a summer-night bar to see Venus With A Filthy Hangover.
What's it all about, Patrick?
"The play is mainly about the six central female characters. Each of them represent a different aspect of women," he explains. "The main character, Diana, is a former sixties pop icon, in the style of Dusty Springfield, whose career has evaporated, but she hasn't the ability to come to terms with that. Her best friend, Hilary, comes down to stay for the weekend, with Hilary's lover. They're lesbians but their relationship starts to fall apart during the play. In fact, a great deal of Act Two is dealing with Hilary, in effect, saying she hates being gay. And Tulip, as it transpires, has feelings of being attracted to men, which she'd never addressed and leaves with a male character.
Indeed, the play really is all about sexuality and asks how can you tie it down, how can you define and limit what we all are, sexually? Walshe continues.
Another aspect to all this is that Diana's manager, Sissy, has come down for the weekend with a member of a new boyband who she's forced into sleeping with her. And there's a fair amount of close-to-the-bone stuff about boybands and music today. At one point Diana says to Sissy, you can't treat me like this, I'm not some little bimbo mouthing the words to 'My Boy Lollipop', to which Sissy responds if you were darling, I could have a three album deal in twenty minutes! .
Patrick Walshe, who is 27, obviously shares Sissy's cynicism, saying he "very much castigates how facile music is today, with the whole boyband culture here in Ireland, of bands from Boyzone to Westlife.
Clearly many readers of hotpress would agree with him on this. Walshe even bases his "boy band character" on a blond-haired, Dublin character who, it seems, may not be that far removed from Ronan Keating. How cruel.
"Well, I'm not saying it is actually Keating!" he jokes. "But it is an attack on all those "singers" in boybands who come along and claim 'our music is great and true to who we are' and all they're doing is lip-synching to someone else's words and music. All of that sums up how I feel about music today, which is very much pop culture McDonalds. It drives me mad."
All of which obviously makes Venus With A Filthy Hangover pretty topical and particularly relevant to pop fans, Walsh suggests. Particularly one of its concluding scenes "where all the characters play this charade game where each has to pretend to be a famous woman in history," he explains. As in women such as Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono.
"Sissy has an entire section where she becomes Yoko Ono and she's talking about Lennon and The Beatles and how much music has deteriorated since those days. And the final principal woman character, Mrs Hinge, becomes Marilyn and Carol, the actor who does that, is 65 and it s really astounding how she captures the essence of Monroe in that scene. It's a hell of a challenge and she more than meets that challenge."
In other words Venus With A Filthy Hangover does sound quite fascinating, right? It's set to close on Saturday 19th but as we went to press Patrick Walshe was keeping his fingers crossed, happily exclaiming "I think it's been extended a further week"
After that? A tour? "I hope so, because we all put too much work into this to have it all end with just one staging."